Sig Christenson is a veteran military reporter who has made nine trips to the war zone. He writes regularly for Hearst about service members, veterans and heroes, among other topics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Military Reporters and Editors, founded in 2002.

Obituaries

07/07/2014

NEW BRAUNFELS — Jake Hixson was to be Sgt. Thomas Spitzer's best man at his wedding, but instead gave his eulogy Monday at St. Paul Lutheran Church before a crowd that spilled into a lobby, while Patriot Guard riders stood outside on a hot afternoon.

The service was followed by a motorcade along Interstate 35 that saw people waiting at an overpass to salute Spitzer and his burial at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Friends recalled Spitzer as a young man who hewed to an honor code that prompted him to volunteer for a second tour of Afghanistan's most contested province, Helmand, where more coalition troops — 951 — have died than in any other. They searched for an upside to the end of a promising life and found it in the way he lived.

“We are left here today to honor a young man who in his 23 years ... lived life to the fullest,” said the Rev. Don Ofsdahl. “He was more interested in the quality of life than in the quantity of years.”

09/04/2012

At 99, Dr. Simon Pierre Zeitlin could look back on two lives full of risk and adventure.

There was the one he had as a physician who opened a South Side practice and later headed the Bexar County Medical Society.

And before that, there was his life at war as a French army captain,
held prisoner by the Nazis until escaping, and crossing the Pyrenees
from Spain to France.

He talked some about that, but not a lot.

“I know he was captured,” said his daughter, Paulette Mallard. “I know he was in the French Foreign Legion in North Africa making his way back to France and I think ... he was captured in Spain.”

Zeitlin had lived in San Antonio for more than 60 years when he died Aug. 28.

He was born on a train in Latvia to French parents, Bernard Pierre and Rachel Zeitlin, and grew up in Charleville, Alsace-Lorraine.

He studied medicine at the University of Paris and joined the French army's medical corps after the war broke out.

Taken captive by German troops, he was relocated to a prisoner-of-war camp in Spain.

Zeitlin, a captain, broke out and crossed the Pyrenees on foot until
he made it to France. Details, however, are sketchy. He didn't talk a
lot about the war, but talked of it in a newspaper story in 1946.

“‘He constantly emphasized the systematic starvation rations handed
out but was restrained in his descriptions, due, he said, to the fact
that many things he had seen and experienced were too obnoxious to ask
civilized people to listen to,'” Mallard said, reading from the
newspaper story.